CHAPTER 7
The tavern was still busy. The broken table and the other signs of the struggle had been cleaned up, and men had gone back to their drinking as if the battle earlier in the evening had never happened.
Preacher didn’t see Chessie when he and Hawk went inside, so he figured she had already gone upstairs. Mike confirmed that when they stopped at the bar.
“Poor girl was shaken up by what happened,” he said as he mopped the bar with a rag. “I told her to get some rest. We can manage down here without her for the rest of the night.”
Preacher and Hawk exchanged a glance but neither said anything. Preacher knew what his son was thinking, because the same thought was in his head. Chessie hadn’t seemed all that upset when she was letting Hoyt Ryker kiss her.
But that was none of his business, Preacher reminded himself. He slid one of his few remaining coins across the bar to pay for a night’s lodging.
“This ain’t a hotel, you know,” Mike said, but he made the silver piece disappear anyway. “But go ahead. ’Tis better than sleeping in a stable, I suppose.”
“Barely,” Preacher replied with a grin.
The rest of the night passed quietly. The straw tick mattress on the bunk in the little upstairs room wasn’t too infested with vermin. Preacher slept well, as he always did, and was rested when he went downstairs the next morning. The tavern was empty except for Mike, who stood behind the bar drinking a cup of coffee. He gestured to the pot sitting on the stove in the corner. Preacher took that as an invitation to help himself.
He did so and carried his cup over to the bar. Mike asked, “Hawk still asleep?”
“Yeah. Boy was up a little later than usual last night. Most times in the mountains or out on the trail, we’d turn in once it got dark. Here in a settlement, though, folks just keep goin’ until they’re wore out.”
Mike grinned. “Which is good for fellas who own taverns, like me.”
Preacher looked around and said, “Reckon that Chessie gal is still asleep, too.”
“I suppose. I haven’t seen her.”
“You takin’ an interest in her, Mike? Sort of like an uncle?”
A frown creased the Irishman’s forehead under his tousled thatch of rusty hair. “What the hell do you mean by that, Preacher? You make it sound like you’re askin’ if I intend to take advantage of her!”
Preacher shook his head and said, “Nope. Just sayin’ exactly what I mean, as usual. If you’ve got the girl’s best interests at heart, there’s somethin’ you ought to know.”
“Well, go ahead and tell me,” Mike said, still glaring.
“When Hawk and I got back here last night after seein’ to it that Merton made it to his hotel all right, we spotted Chessie outside. She was with a man, and she didn’t seem upset. Fact is, the two of ’em were sparkin’.” Preacher realized he was gossiping like an old woman. He didn’t like the feeling. “We caught a glimpse of the fella as he left. It was Hoyt Ryker.”
Mike stood up straight and stared at the mountain man. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. He had that fancy mustache like we talked about, but I got a good enough look at his face to remember him from the last time we butted heads a few years ago, too. It was Ryker, all right. He ain’t left town after all. I reckon he must’ve met Chessie one of the times he was in here recently.”
“She’s young enough she might fall for whatever he told her,” Mike muttered. “Damn it! Somebody needs to talk to her and warn her about the varmint, but that ain’t the kind of thing I’m good at.”
“Well, since you’ve sort of appointed yourself her guardian, I reckon it’s your responsibility.”
“Yeah, but you’re the one who actually saw ’em together!” Mike shook his head and sighed. “All right. I’ll have a talk with her. I ain’t promising it’ll go all that well, though.”
“Give it a try,” Preacher said. “As for me and Hawk, we’ll be headin’ back to the mountains, where all we got to worry about is grizzly bears, catamounts, and Blackfeet!”
* * *
Vernon Pritchard had the payment for the pelts ready when Preacher and Hawk arrived at the American Fur Company later that morning. He set the leather pouch full of gold pieces on the desk in front of him and said, “There you go, Preacher. You can count it if you like.”
“You never cheated me yet, Vernon, and I ain’t expectin’ you to start now,” Preacher said as he scooped up the pouch. “Anyway, it’ll get counted when Hawk and me head over to Fitzgerald’s and stock up on supplies for our trip back to the mountains. We’ll be spendin’ most of these here coins, I expect.”
“Fitzgerald’s goods don’t come cheap,” Pritchard agreed. “They’re of fine quality, though.”
Preacher stowed the money away inside his shirt. “Pleasure doin’ business with you,” he told Pritchard. Hawk just grunted and gave the man a nod, then turned to follow Preacher out of the office.
Preacher said so long to Henry, the stooped clerk, and then led Hawk to the huge, sprawling general mercantile store a short distance away. The business occupied an entire block, with entrances and high loading docks on all four sides. Inside it was crammed with goods. Whether a trapper was an experienced frontiersman or a greenhorn, everything he might need for a trip to the Rocky Mountains could be found at Fitzgerald’s. The store’s customers also included many of the citizens of St. Louis, as well as those who lived on the growing number of farms in the surrounding area.
Those farms were a sign of civilization’s inevitable encroachment, and Preacher sort of hated to see them sprouting up like weeds. They reminded him too much of his boyhood home. He had been eager to escape from there and head for more untamed lands. Now the sort of life he had left behind appeared to be catching up to him.
He took some small comfort in the fact that he spent most of his time hundreds of miles west of here in the mountains. Civilization would never make it that far, he told himself, at least not in his lifetime.
Despite the relatively early hour, the store was already busy, with wagons parked at the loading docks and horses tied up at the hitch racks. As Preacher and Hawk approached, the mountain man saw clerks wearing canvas aprons loading sacks and crates of supplies onto a pair of wagons. A tall man in woolen trousers and a buckskin shirt appeared to be supervising the loading. He also wore a felt hat with a high, rounded crown and an eagle feather stuck in the band. Something about that hat struck Preacher as familiar, and when the man turned so that Preacher could see his profile, he understood why. He had caught a glimpse of the hat the night before as its owner walked by after sparking with Chessie Dayton.
It was Hoyt Ryker standing there on the loading dock telling the clerks how to load the supplies into the wagons.
Hawk had recognized Ryker, too. “There is the man with the mustache,” he said as Preacher slowed and then stopped.
“Yeah,” the mountain man said. He scratched his beard-stubbled jaw and frowned. Would Ryker recognize him, too, he wondered? Preacher was a little more grizzled now than he had been a few years earlier, but he still looked pretty much the same. And he didn’t imagine Ryker would have forgotten their confrontation.
On the other hand, Preacher wasn’t in the habit of letting anybody stop him from going where he wanted to go, and he sure as hell wasn’t afraid of Hoyt Ryker. His mouth tightened into a grim line as he strode toward Fitzgerald’s with Hawk beside him.
Ryker glanced in their direction, then looked at them again, more sharply this time. That answered the question of whether or not Ryker had recognized him, Preacher thought. Ryker wasn’t paying any attention to what was going in the wagons anymore. He was watching Preacher, instead.
Preacher and Hawk went up the steps to the loading dock, which also doubled as a porch for the store. Ryker moved a little, not in any hurry, but Preacher noted that the shift put Ryker between them and the store’s entrance. If they wanted to go inside, they had no choice but to come to a halt facing Ryker and tell him to step aside.
Ryker’s mouth twisted in a smirk as Preacher and Hawk came up to him. He said, “Never thought you’d see me again, did you, Preacher?”
“Well, I was hopin’,” the mountain man said. “We’re goin’ in the store, Ryker.”
Ryker ignored that and nodded toward Hawk. “Who’s the redskin?” he asked.
“I am Hawk That Soars,” Hawk said. “Preacher is my father.”
Ryker laughed and said, “Is that so? Spawned a whelp with some fat little squaw, did you, Preacher?”
Hawk took that badly, which came as no surprise. Ryker had meant to be offensive. Hawk started to step toward Ryker, but Preacher put a hand out to stop him.
“You know, you ain’t any more pleasant to be around than you were the last time,” Preacher said as his eyes narrowed in anger. “If you want to take up where we left off, you’re makin’ a good start on it.”
Ryker lifted both hands, palms out. “Hold on, hold on,” he said. “I’m not looking for trouble. I’m willing to forget all about what happened between us in the past. In fact, if you come right down to it, I’m grateful to you for what you did.”
“Grateful?” Preacher repeated. He didn’t believe for a second that Ryker was being sincere. “Why would you be grateful?”
“I was drunk that night,” Ryker said, not telling Preacher anything he didn’t already know. “Now, mind you, I was mighty good with a knife and I still am . . . but I might have missed because of all the whiskey I’d had, and that would’ve been terrible. I might not have had to answer to the law—she was just a tavern girl, after all—but I would’ve carried that guilt around with me for the rest of my life. So I owe you a debt, Preacher, for saving me from that.”
Preacher didn’t believe Ryker was capable of feeling guilt. He ignored what the man had said and told him, “We’re goin’ inside. You need to get out of the way.”
“Before we’ve finished our talk?”
“We don’t have anything to talk about,” Preacher snapped. He took a step forward. He and Ryker were the same height. His chest was about to bump Ryker’s chest when a heavy footstep sounded in the store’s doorway. Ryker laughed and stepped aside.
Preacher saw that the entrance was still blocked, this time by a massive man who towered over both him and Ryker. A black beard jutted halfway down the man’s chest, but the top of his head was bald as an egg, a fact revealed by his lack of a hat. Thick slabs of muscle on his arms, shoulders, and chest strained the homespun shirt he wore. He had a large, apparently heavy barrel perched on one shoulder like it didn’t weigh anything at all.
“You want me to put this in the wagon, Hoyt?” he asked Ryker in a voice that rumbled like a rockslide.
“No, just set it to the side for now, Pidge,” Ryker told him. “I want you to meet a couple of friends of mine. This is Preacher and his half-breed son, Hawk.”
“We ain’t your friends, Ryker,” Preacher said coldly.
The huge man called Pidge ignored that and lowered the barrel to the loading dock, handling it easily. A grin wreathed his face under the bushy beard as he said, “Howdy, Preacher. Howdy, Hawk. I’m named after a bird, too, you know. Well, it ain’t my Christian name, I reckon. I don’t rightly remember what that was, but my ma always called me Pigeon when I was a boy, on account of I was so little and reminded her of a bird.”
Preacher didn’t see how Pidge could have ever been small enough to remind anybody of a bird, but he supposed anything was possible. He could tell that Pidge wasn’t quite right in the head, so he said, “We’d be obliged if you’d step aside so we can go on in the store. We got to buy supplies.”
Pidge didn’t seem to hear him. He was fascinated by Hawk. He asked, “What kind of a Injun are you?”
“Absaroka,” Hawk replied with a note of pride in his voice.
Pidge shook his head and said, “I don’t know nothin’ about them. Are they good Injuns or bad Injuns?”
“The Absaroka are an honorable people,” Hawk said.
“Well, that’s good, I reckon. We’re gonna see a bunch of Injuns, Hoyt says. We’re goin’ west on a espy . . . exper . . .”
“Expedition,” Ryker supplied.
“That’s why you’re loadin’ up those wagons?” Preacher asked.
“That’s right,” Ryker said. “Although it’s not really any business of yours, is it?”
It wasn’t, but knowing that didn’t stop Preacher from bristling at the man’s tone. He was already inclined to dislike Ryker because of what had happened several years earlier, and seeing him with Chessie the night before hadn’t helped matters. Preacher wasn’t jealous, by any means, but he suspected that Ryker meant to trifle with Chessie’s affections and he believed she deserved better than that. Maybe having him out of St. Louis, away from the girl, was a good idea.
“I don’t care about your business, Ryker,” Preacher said. “Just stay out of my way—that’s all I want from you.”
“So you’re saying you don’t want to be friends?” The sly smile that tugged at Ryker’s lips told Preacher the man was up to something.
“Damn right I’m not your friend,” Preacher said, repeating his declaration from a few minutes earlier.
Pidge frowned and reached out with a hamlike hand. He rested it on Preacher’s chest as the mountain man tried to go around him.
“Wait just a doggone minute. How come you don’t want to be friends with Hoyt? He’s my friend.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that,” Preacher said, “because he’s a no-good polecat and lower than a snake.”
A thunderous roar came from Pidge as an angry frown darkened his face. “You can’t talk that way about my friend!” he bellowed. He reached out and grabbed the front of Preacher’s buckskin shirt.
Pidge heaved . . . and Preacher found himself flying wildly through the air.